IoT service placement with load distribution and service migration in edge computing for 5G networks

Abstract

Edge Computing (EC) is a promising concept to alleviate some of the cloud computing limitations in supporting Internet of Things (IoT) applications, especially time-sensitive applications, by bringing computing resources closer to end users, at the network edges. As promising as EC is, it also faces many challenges. These are mainly related to the resource management in the vast, distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous setting brought by EC. A relevant issue for resource management is the service placement problem, which is the decision-making process of determining where to place different applications or services over the EC infrastructure according to some constraints, requirements, and performance goals. This decision-making process can thus be extended to include other related issues, such as load distribution and service migration. In this thesis, we investigate the IoT services placement with load distribution and service migration in the context of next generation networks with EC capabilities, such as the fifth-generation (5G) mobile system. First, we address service placement with load distribution as single and multi-objective problems and we the proposal to solve these using a well-chosen genetic algorithm. Analytical results show that through our proposed formulation and the associated proposed algorithms, we are able to outperform other benchmark algorithms in terms of multiple conflicting objectives, such as response deadline violation, operational cost, and service availability. Then, in order to handle load fluctuations, we propose a centralized limited look-ahead prediction control that periodically readjusts service placement and load distribution decisions by taking into account the performance-cost trade-off of service migrations. Evaluation results show that our predictive control has even better system performance regarding response deadline violations with a small additional migration cost compared to benchmark algorithms. Finally, we address the scalability issue faced by centralized decision-making process by designing a hierarchical distributed service placement solution. The evaluation of our distributed control indicates that the trade-off between the system performance and the scalability of decision-making depends on how the control decision problem is decomposed.